In the two decades since the urban riots of the mid-sixties, the black ghettos of large American cities have undergone a sharp deterioration. The woes of the inner city are the result of profound changes in three interrelated sets of …
He was our voice, our hope, our pride. When Mike Harrington rose to speak, in that piercing alto of his, we all felt that the familiar language of socialism took on the complexion of youth, the freshness of truth. For …
Increased economic political integration of the European Community in 1992, combined with the penetration of national economies by the world market, make it necessary for the West European labor movements to shift their strategies in a less national and parochial …
A complex class context underlies the changes in black American politics of the last twenty years. Today’s black stratification comprises sharply different classes—a coping stratum made up of blue- and white-collar workers, professionals and managers, business people and wealthy entertainers, …
For the better part of a century following the abolition of slavery blacks continued to play an unenviable role within the labor force. Because they were excluded to a considerable degree from the unions by racial practices, both black leaders …
The conclusions of the Kerner Commission Report on the urban riots during the late 1960s have been widely accepted; namely that this angry black urban upheaval was driven by a gnawing alienation and despair among mainly working-class and poor Afro-Americans. …
“Socialism,” writes Michael Harrington, “is the hope for human freedom and justice under the unprecedented conditions of life that humanity will face in the twenty-first century. Socialism?” he asks in the same breath: “How can a nostalgic irrelevance be the …
Steven P. Erie’s Rainbow’s End is a major study of Irish-American political organizations in eight cities. Although the focus of Erie’s book is on the forces behind the successes and failures of such powerful figures as Richard Daley, James Michael …
Fifty years ago Neville Chamberlain emerged from his airplane, gestured with his umbrella, and announced to his anxious countrymen that the abject surrender he had just signed in Munich would assure them what the Prayer Book pleads for, “peace in …
Ten years ago I tried to interpret Mexico for Ilan and Irving Howe in a single day. I took them to Aztec ruins and to markets where indigenous customs live on virtually intact. We strolled through the center of Mexico …
When John Rawls began writing A Theory of Justice in the 1950s, philosophers were busy lamenting the death of political philosophy. Grand political theories, Bernard Crick observed, were treated like “corpses for students to practice dissection upon.” Some philosophers, calling …
In the late fifties marrying an economic equal was neither necessary nor possible. Most middle-class—or for that matter, blue-collar working class—men could expect to earn enough to support a wife and children. Moreover, most women who intended to marry and …
In The Rebel Camus seeks to criticize “the astonishing history of European pride” that laid the groundwork for both Nazism and Stalinism and that lies at the heart of our contemporary sense of moral confusion. The book reverberates with echoes …
I wish to inquire into an ancient theme, that of the microfoundation of a democratic society, the exemplary constitution of the democratic, rather than of Adorno’s authoritarian, personality. I realize that the formation of that sort of personality is like …
The trouble with undercover police operations, Gary Marx’s excellent new book might lead us to conclude, is that they breed government waste: not waste of time or money so much as of human personality and integrity of the law itself. …
